Eat your heart out, Microsoft Surface! Musicians are taking up interactive tables as new ways of making their creations physically accessible, so listeners can reach out and touch the work.
Etiquette is a new interactive installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, featuring a light box on which musical elements can be manipulated by moving around blocks. It uses the same underlying library that was developed for the ReacTable synth, currently made famous by its use on Bjork’s tour.
But what’s nice about the Etiquette is — surprise — the music. Rather than predictable electronic sounds, Etiquette echoes and vibrates with laptop-sampled acoustic timbres, such as stand-up bass, banjo, brass, flute, and even glockenspiel. It’s still digital music: fragments of music are reconceived in the digital world, overlapping into an ambient landscape. But the common criticism of installation art — that you wouldn’t want to sit and listen to the music produced — is answered here. Etiquette is available as a downloadable Creative Commons-licensed four-track album. I just sat and listened to it, and was quite happy! It’s real music played by real musicians that seems perfectly suited to its interactive counterpart; the free-flowing form of the music is ideal for rearranging in an installation. (In somewhat less interactive form, I expect I may have it on repeat here in my studio on and off for the next few days!)
Everything was produced on-location: many of the materials themselves were found on site, and recordings were made around the workshop.
The project is a collaboration between musicians and technologists: the band FOUND worked with computer scientist (and CDM reader) Simon Kirby.
Simon writes in with additional details of the setup, which features Ableton Live, Max/MSP, and the ReacTIVision library:
I’m a big fan of Create Digital Music, and in fact it was through reading your blog that I came across the Reactivision project which has lead directly to the commission and event I’m writing to you about. So, firstly, thank you!
I am involved with a music/art collective based in Edinburgh called Found, and we have been commission by the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop to produce ETIQUETTE: an ambitious, interactive sound installation to commemorate their 20th anniversary. It will be unveiled on 4 August in their gallery space / workshop and will feature a special performance from Found at the opening event. The installation will take the form of a light box table – visitors to the gallery over the next month will be able to compose their own variations of our specially commissioned music by moving objects around the table.
The project brings together a lot of the previous strands of our work including: pop music, visual art and an innovative use of technology.
The table itself uses a combination of the reactivision software, MAX/ MSP and Ableton Live to deliver the sound over a quadraphonic audio set up. We’re trying to steer clear of some of the cliches of this kind of music technology by using found sounds and building materials from the workshop and by recording only acoustic musical instruments on location at the workshop and its grounds.
It’s funny; I’m sympathetic to their approach not only literally, but philosophically, as well. I think when technology is working, the process feels more like discovery.
Thanks, Simon! If anyone visits, let us know how it goes!
Etiquette: Photos, videos, downloadable album, and project details
Since Simon got these resources from CDM, here they are, again:
Max/MSP on CDM; official site
Ableton Live on CDM; official site
Reactable on CDM
Free ReacTIVision library (with examples for Flash, Java, C++, Max, Processing, Pure Data, C#, SuperCollider, Quartz Composer, GEM, and vvvv!)
